Section 1

1. What, then, will be the Soul's discourse, what its memories
in the Intellectual Realm, when at last it has won its way to that
Essence?

Obviously from what we have been saying, it will be in
contemplation of that order, and have its Act upon the things among
which it now is; failing such Contemplation and Act, its being is
not there. Of things of earth it will know nothing; it will not, for
example, remember an act of philosophic virtue, or even that in its
earthly career it had contemplation of the Supreme.

When we seize anything in the direct intellectual act there is
room for nothing else than to know and to contemplate the object;
and in the knowing there is not included any previous knowledge; all
such assertion of stage and progress belongs to the lower and is a
sign of the altered; this means that, once purely in the
Intellectual,
no one of us can have any memory of our experience here. Further; if
all intellection is timeless- as appears from the fact that the
Intellectual beings are of eternity not of time- there can be no
memory in the intellectual world, not merely none of earthly things
but none whatever: all is presence There; for nothing passes away,
there is no change from old to new.

This, however, does not alter the fact that distinction exists
in that realm- downwards from the Supreme to the Ideas, upward from
the Ideas to the Universal and to the Supreme. Admitting that the
Highest, as a self-contained unity, has no outgoing effect, that
does not prevent the soul which has attained to the Supreme from
exerting its own characteristic Act: it certainly may have the
intuition, not by stages and parts, of that Being which is without
stage and part.

But that would be in the nature of grasping a pure unity?

No: in the nature of grasping all the intellectual facts
of a many
that constitutes a unity. For since the object of vision has variety
[distinction within its essential oneness] the intuition must be
multiple and the intuitions various, just as in a face we see at the
one glance eyes and nose and all the rest.

But is not this impossible when the object to be thus divided
and treated as a thing of grades, is a pure unity?

No: there has already been discrimination within the
Intellectual-Principle; the Act of the soul is little more than a
reading of this.

First and last is in the Ideas not a matter of time, and so does
not bring time into the soul's intuition of earlier and later among
them. There is a grading by order as well: the ordered disposition
of some growing thing begins with root and reaches to topmost point,
but, to one seeing the plant as a whole, there is no other first and
last than simply that of the order.

Still, the soul [in this intuition within the divine] looks to
what is a unity; next it entertains multiplicity, all that is: how
explain this grasping first of the unity and later of the rest?

The explanation is that the unity of this power [the Supreme] is
such as to allow of its being multiple to another principle [the
soul], to which it is all things and therefore does not
present itself
as one indivisible object of intuition: its activities do not [like
its essence] fall under the rule of unity; they are for ever
multiple in virtue of that abiding power, and in their outgoing they
actually become all things.

For with the Intellectual or Supreme- considered as distinct
from the One- there is already the power of harbouring that
Principle of Multiplicity, the source of things not previously
existent in its superior.